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If the Intellectual-Principle were the engendering Source,
then the engendered secondary, while less perfect than the
Intellectual-Principle, would be close to it and similar to it:
but since the engendering Source is above the
Intellectual-Principle, the secondary can only be that principle.
But why is the Intellectual-Principle not the generating source?
Because [it is not a self-sufficing simplex]: the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle is intellection, which means that, seeing
the intellectual object towards which it has turned, it is
consummated, so to speak, by that object, being in itself
indeterminate like sight [a vague readiness for any and every
vision] and determined by the intellectual object. This is why it
has been said that "out of the indeterminate dyad and The One
arise the Ideas and the numbers": for the dyad is the
Intellectual-Principle.
Thus it is not a simplex; it is manifold; it exhibits a certain
composite quality- within the Intellectual or divine order, of
course- as the principle that sees the manifold. It is, further,
itself simultaneously object and agent of intellection and is on
that count also a duality: and it possesses besides another
object of intellection in the Order following upon itself.
But how can the Intellectual-Principle be a product of the
Intellectual Object?
In this way: the intellectual object is self-gathered
[self-compact] and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing
principle must be- deficient, mean, as needing an object- it is
therefore no unconscious thing: all its content and accompaniment
are its possession; it is self-distinguishing throughout; it is
the seat of life as of all things; it is, itself, that
self-intellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to
say, in a mode other than that of the Intellectual-Principle.
But if something comes to being within an entity which in no way
looks outside itself- and especially within a being which is the
sum of being- that entity must be the source of the new thing:
stable in its own identity, it produces; but the product is that
of an unchanged being: the producer is unchangeably the
intellectual object, the product is produced as the Intellectual
Act, an Act taking intellection of its source- the only object
that exists for it- and so becoming Intellectual-Principle, that
is to say, becoming another intellectual being, resembling its
source, a reproduction and image of that.
But how from amid perfect rest can an Act arise?
There is in everything the Act of the Essence and the Act going
out from the Essence: the first Act is the thing itself in its
realized identity, the second Act is an inevitably following
outgo from the first, an emanation distinct from the thing
itself.
Thus even in fire there is the warmth comported by its essential
nature and there is the warmth going instantaneously outward from
that characterizing heat by the fact that the fire, remaining
unchangeably fire, utters the Act native to its essential
reality.
So it is in the divine also: or rather we have there the earlier
form of the double act: the divine remains in its own unchanging
being, but from its perfection and from the Act included in its
nature there emanates the secondary or issuing Act which- as the
output of a mighty power, the mightiest there is- attains to Real
Being as second to that which stands above all Being. That
transcendent was the potentiality of the All; this secondary is
the All made actual.
And if this is all things, that must be above and outside of all,
so, must transcend real being. And again, if that secondary is
all things, and if above its multiplicity there is a unity not
ranking among those things, once more this unity transcends Real
Being and therefore transcends the Intellectual-Principle as
well. There is thus something transcending
Intellectual-Principle, for we must remember that real being is
no corpse, the negation of life and of intellection, but is in
fact identical with the Intellectual-Principle. The
Intellectual-Principle is not something taking cognisance of
things as sensation deals with sense objects existing
independently of sense: on the contrary, it actually is the
things it knows: the ideas constituting them it has not borrowed:
whence could it have taken them? No: it exists here together with
the things of the universe, identical with them, making a unity
with them; and the collective knowledge [in the divine mind] of
the immaterial is the universe of things.
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